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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 42:2 (2018) ► pp.329–368

A sense of agency

Accounting for a change-in-progress in Australian Kriol pronoun distribution

| Yale University

Roper Kriol exhibits variation in the shape of the first-person singular pronoun in subject position. This paper provides an account of the numerous syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that appear to influence the selection of either ai or mi based predominantly on a study of a corpus of the written language. It is claimed that the synchronic distribution of ai and mi is an innovation primarily motivated by speaker reanalysis of the semantic entailments frequently associated with English subject and object arguments – effectively evidence of the partial grammaticalisation of agentivity in these varieties. This work has implications for our understanding of ‘agentivity’ as a cross-linguistic, cognitive category and for the dynamic relationship between semantic roles and the morphosyntactic encoding of grammatical relations.

Keywords: grammaticalisation, Kriol, Australian Kriol, Pidgins & Creoles, semantics, semantic change, corpus linguistics, contact linguistics, transitivity, agentivity, pronouns, pragmatics’ grammatical relations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background
    • 1.2The Kriol pronoun paradigm
  • 2.Agentivity & Transitivity
    • 2.1Transitivity: Hopper & Thompson (1980)
    • 2.2Proto-Roles: Dowty (1991)
    • 2.3Uniting these approaches
      • 2.3.1Optional case marking
      • 2.3.2The semantics of case marking
  • 3.Pronoun selection: Corpus study
    • 3.1Materials and method
    • 3.2Environmental effects: Obligatory conditions
    • 3.3Structured variation: Semantic constraints
      • 3.3.1No endpoint: Correlation with imperfectivity
      • 3.3.2Modalities and polarity
      • 3.3.3Valence
    • 3.4Lexical semantics: Further observations
  • 4.A diachronic account of ai~mi variation
    • 4.1Transfer
    • 4.2Pronominal ‘case’: A diachronic vestige as the input
    • 4.3Accounting for the variation
      • 4.3.1Semantic factors
      • 4.3.2Distributional factors
    • 4.4Concluding remarks and future directions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17025.phi
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